


For Love of the Hunt

by acidtonguejenny



Category: Horizon: Zero Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Biting, F/M, Russian Translation Available, Unsafe Sex, Violent Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-17
Updated: 2017-03-17
Packaged: 2018-10-06 15:40:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10338006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acidtonguejenny/pseuds/acidtonguejenny
Summary: If she’s hard on Nil, it’s because she understands more of him than she wants to. The thrill of the hunt, the surge of pride when her prey finally goes down after a long fight. The hot, smug satisfaction of taking an enemy unaware.Most of her hunts end in sparking husks and dimmed lights: her targets are machines. But sometimes she hunts men, and no matter how much she wishes otherwise, her blood pounds the same.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Available in Russian [here](https://ficbook.net/readfic/5381486)! Translated by k_jeyjey.

If she’s hard on Nil, it’s because she understands more of him than she wants to. The thrill of the hunt, the surge of pride when her prey finally goes down after a long fight. The hot, smug satisfaction of taking an enemy unaware.  

Most of her hunts end in sparking husks and dimmed lights: her targets are machines. But sometimes she hunts men, and no matter how much she wishes otherwise, her blood pounds the same.

Nil reads her like a scroll. It makes her angry, makes her short.

She spies him on the hill, not far outside of a camp. The acrid scent of burning filth had drawn her from her path.

She approaches him.

“I waited for you.” He says, warmly, as if she is a good friend. It brings a flush to her face, born of both anger and unwilling pleasure. This last only makes her angrier. “Time pulls the anticipation tight as a wire.”

She knows what he means. She thinks of stalking a lone Shell-walker through the night, never cutting it down, but often considering it.

She thanks the Goddess she thinks of the Shell-walker first.

Nil smirks. His eyes wrinkle at the corners. “How many has it been now?”

“I don’t keep count, Nil.” Aloy says, sharply, as if her heart had not quietly beat faster as she chased the sight of smoke on the horizon.

“Don’t keep count?” He says. “Sometimes I don’t get you. Are you like us, or a little different?”

She is, proudly, different. The hunt has come to call to her no matter the prey, but she is shamed by it.

Nil is not.

“Hopefully a little different.”

Nil eyes her, like he does sometimes. Like many have since she was named Seeker. Sometimes she thinks she returns their looks.

Slowly, she has come to realize what that look means. What it feels like when her body answers it. Had she grown as a part of the tribe, she would have taken a mate soon.

“That’s what you’re going to tell yourself.” Nil says, ever sure, ever dismissive of her denials. “Shall we get started?”

They do. The hunt is sweet as she has come to expect. Aloy has shared her hunts with many in the past months, and must admit that Nil is her preferred partner. She works best left to her own devices, likes to take her time, to follow her prey until it staggers. Nil has confided his love of the rush, the resistance, the struggle, but when she slips into the tall grass with her bow drawn, he follows just as silently.

It pleases her more than perhaps it ought to.

She takes the sentries with arrows, and he the patrols with a quick knife thrust. She picks off those guarding the prisoners as he disappears into the ramshackle fort, and figures vanish from the windows.

It takes patience, and time. Her heart beats a tattoo against her breastbone all the while. It is worth it.

She savors her hunts.

When the prisoners are freed and the fires lit to draw settlers, Nil finds her again.

“A little different,” He repeats, sly and proud, and in such a way that Aloy cannot ignore the fact that they are surrounded by the bodies of men they felled together.

He is blood splattered and loose-limbed like a glutted cat. There is the impression of a hand in the gore on his chest, the lines of dragging fingers as the one who grasped at him crumpled. Her eyes are drawn to those tracks individually.

When she kills, it is cleanly. She doesn’t know what blood on her skin feels like.

He is mocking her, as he likes to. He is also _looking_ at her, and Aloy knows she is looking back, damn her.

She doesn’t answer him, tries to exude disdain, but doesn’t think she is successful. Her heart is still beating rapidly, and he’s still looking at her the same way Erend has, the way Varl has.

_Oh._

The hunt is still on.

Aloy finds it is a strange thing, to be prey.

“Pretty huntress.” Nil says, as he takes a slow, sideways step towards her, like one approaches a mad, snapping animal. Another.

Aloy puts a hand out. To stop him. It fits over the mark on his chest, nearly the same size. This bandit had been a woman.

“I so enjoy our joint endeavors.” Nil says. Her eyes are drawn to the flash of tongue past his teeth. “Almost as much as I think you do.”

Her blood is burning in her veins, like it does when she lines up a finishing shot. When she skewers a downed, sparking machine on her spear. His hand, rested on her hip, draws her in.

He bites at her lips. She bites back, and harder. His tactics do not surprise her.

They go to the ground unevenly, in many small battles won and lost.

She wonders as he bears her down whether this feels to him as good as taking a life.

“Tight as a wire.” She hisses, grunting as he puts teeth to a freshly bared breast. She kicks his pants down with her heels, heedless of toughened soles on the small of his back, and feels tugging at her armor about the waist.

She looks down between their bodies, to where he is ruddy hard and leaking from the tip. Her experience with this part of men is limited and all recent, but she thinks he must have been this way for ages. Possibly since she met him on the hill, where he watched the bandits crawling about their little fortress.

His fingers scrub in the stiff hair covering her sex, finding her slit with hardened fingers and mapping it roughly. Glancing touches to her apex jolt her, so she tugs savagely on his vest. She pushes the helmet off his head and grins when he snarls as it pulls his hair; it’d been secured with pins.

“You like anticipation, pretty huntress?” He says by her ear, beard scratching.

“If you do it right.” She says haughtily.

He pushes into her then, like the quick sink of a blade. Aloy shouts at the suddenness and in delight of the stretch.

Nil gets his elbows on ground, his knees beneath her, claiming all her leverage for himself.

“I see your challenge.” He says with cheer.

He likes the struggle she knows, so she struggles. Bucks to throw him off, slaps at his arms and bites at his hands. He brings his weight on her with bright, wide eyes and a wider smile. Holds her head back so she cannot reach him with her teeth, pins her wrists to the dirt with one hand, while he works himself in and out of her.

Aloy pushes her breasts into his chest, feeling the smear of wet blood and the faint scratch of dried transferring to her skin. She moans, she coos. She holds him to her with straining thigh muscles.

Nil groans freely against her neck; she distrusts him there, sharp teeth too close to very thin skin, but the thrill is too good.

She feels the telltale tightening below as her body sucks at him, has recognized the signs of approaching climax in him.

He stops before she can finish, jerking out of her and gripping himself at the root.

Injustice. Aloy cries out, her muscles clenching at a vital thickness that is not there. Nil laughs over her, the sound uneven as he breathes. He was as close as she was.

“ _Why_.” She demands through clenched teeth.

“Tight as a wire.” Nil says, pitiless. She can feel the blunt, wet head of him bumping her pelvis, tries to wiggle him back inside.

“Nah ah ah.” He sing-songs, and laughs again when she slaps him with a hand worked free. Her nails score his cheek.

Aloy throws them over, heavy armor and all with the strength of frustration and sinks onto him before he can counter her. She sighs happily, turning her hips in wide circles. Nil’s hands land on her hips, holding so tightly her bones twinge.

She hears his heels drag on the ground, feels his knees come up at her back, and has gripped him with her legs when he surges upwards so violently it hurts. She bounces just ahead of his second such thrust, and the next, until the sweat that had threatened as they hunted finally breaks.

And once more as she prepares for that final rush, mouth open, her eyes fogged, he robs her, hurling her off.

Aloy tumbles twice before catching herself, getting her feet beneath her in a crouch as she growls at him like a Ravager.

As he pitched her aside he had launched himself away, and faces her from a short distance, tangled in his disarrayed armor. Aloy is not as disadvantaged, but only just. His chest heaves as hers does; there are clean patches in the splatter pattern. The handprint is mostly gone, eclipsed by the round shape her breast made.

Her hand searches the ground, her fingers finding a rock. Nil draws a knife from his boot.

They collapse a shoddy tent in the grapple that ensues, rolling into one of the supports. Aloy shouts as her back collides painfully with the thick, unyielding length of wood, and punches out with the hand holding the rock. Nil’s head jerks back. A gash opens on his chin.

He chokes, momentarily dazed. His face falls to her shoulder. Aloy has a moment of clarity, recalls what she’d fought to won. She reaches between them, takes him in hand as she opens her legs.

“Good, good,” She breathes, walking her hips down to take him better.

Nil groans, mouth wet against her collar, breath tickling. The stars behind his eyes are clearing. He moves into her.

Aloy holds him fast with ankles locked behind him. She grips a handful of hair and jerks his head up to meet their eyes.

“Do it again,” She says, in such a way so he knows she means _do not_.

Nil’s eyes drift downwards, in the direction she holds his knife, taken from his hand, to the side of his throat. He grins. His eyes dance.

“I do as you command.” He says, impertinent, and thrusts into her as proof of his willingness. It’s a noticeably weaker effort. The blow to his head wilted his eagerness; he is not quite so firm inside her.

Aloy finds none of these things displease her. She preens beneath him, fancying this is what it feels to be Sun King.

They are dust-covered and twisted up in torn clothing. Nil has long since lost his vest, and a few of the mirrored plates are missing from his armor. Aloy feels the bumps of beads at her back, one of her necklaces broken. Her body trembles finely for exhaustion, a long day’s walk ended with a long hunt and now this. Nil’s naked chest slides against hers; he too is damp with sweat, and tired from their skirmishing. His breath, coming against her throat, is ragged.

It takes many faltering, arrhythmic thrusts of his hips to finally bring her off. Nil holds his finish off with immense will, veins stark in his throat and forehead. When her inner muscles ripple and squeeze him, he releases in her with a gasp.

Belatedly, he pulls away. His second shot lands hot across her groin. The third weak, on the inside of one thigh.

Nil collapses on her heavily, driving the air out of her. She lowers the knife she’d held to his throat, but doesn't drop it.

They breath for a moment, mutually gasping.

Aloy cannot quite feel her hurts over the slowly dimming roar, but that is temporary, she knows.

Nil is satisfactorily marked: the cuts to his face, many imprints of teeth, bruises and nail marks aplenty. There are shallow marks on his neck, where her knife-wielding hand had not been steady in the last.

Aloy doesn’t mind them. Likewise Nil does not appear to object, if the way he shivers in the wake of their coupling is anything to go by.

“Well, that was a rush.” He says, long minutes later. He lifts himself away, carefully as one uncertain of his joints.

Aloy tries to be subtle about how she pulls herself up the strut of a tent. She doesn’t manage. Nil leers, but she only returns it, because he still suffers intermittent shudders.

He laughs.

“Did I do it right?” He asks.

Aloy is aware of a delicious soreness developing between her legs.

“Middling to fair.” She says.

“I shall have to try harder next time.” Nil says. He tries to affect solemnity, but his lips twitch, and his eyes are too gleeful.

Aloy catches herself thinking of _next time_ with relish, and scowls.

**Author's Note:**

> Dialogue at the beginning lifted from the game :3


End file.
